Kylie Jenner’s Meta Smart Glasses Parodied in Guerrilla Lenticular Ad
An activist group has created a spoof billboard ad on a London bus stop, taking aim at Meta’s AI smart glasses.
The subvertisement, close to Meta’s U.K. HQ, makes use of lenticular printing, a specialty printing technique that shifts the image when viewed from different angles.
This particular ad, made by the protest group Everybody Hates Elon, shows an image of Kylie Jenner in what first appears to be a normal for Meta’s smart glasses — the Kardashian sister recently partnered with Meta for the rollout of their non-Ray Ban branded spectacles.
But walk around the ad and the picture dramatically changes: Jenner turns into a skeleton monster as the text reads, “We’re always watching.”
Skeletal Jenner is a nod to the 1988 sci-fi horror movie They Live in which a working-class drifter discovers that the ruling class are aliens in disguise.
“Meta has spent years tracking us online,” Everyone Hates Elon (EHE) tells Hyperallergic. “Now it wants to track us in the real world too.”
As their name suggests, the activist group has previously targeted the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, as well as taking aim at Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.
Despite strong sales, there is an increasing backlash toward Meta’s smart glasses. This is in no small part because of their reputation as “pervert glasses” and popularity in the manosphere where they are seen as useful devices to clandestinely record women for social media purposes.
Of course, Meta also owns Facebook and Instagram, so the company stands accused of not only providing the glasses but building an entire ecosystem for the resulting content.
“Meta and Ray-Ban’s new AI glasses can be used to secretly record women and young people for sexual reasons,” EHE says. “Simply put, that’s abuse.”
The backlash over the glasses has gotten so bad that a recent report revealed that some owners are too nervous to leave the house while wearing them.
“There have been times in which I basically fold them up and hang them on my shirt, to show more clearly that I’m not actively using them,” one content creator told Engadget.
Meta has reacted to the problem, announcing earlier this month that anyone concealing the LED recording light — that is supposed to let others know they’re being filmed — will find that the camera is disabled.
